This invention relates generally to the field of video signal processing and pattern recognition, and more particularly to a system of video stream processing including a modular family of novel video processing subsystem modules using digital techniques to process images.
Image reconition techniques are becoming widely utilized to automate industrial and manufacturing processing applications. Among these are such applications as locating parts on a conveyor belt, verifying the presence of parts during assembly, locating landmarks or targets in aerial imagery, optical character recognition, and locating bonding pads on alignment masks on semiconductor chips. Further, the development and implementation of systems for the more complex real time image processing and pattern recognition tasks call for computational throughputs in excess of those possible utilizing prior art techniques. In addition, in many applications digital techniques are widely employed to process the images. However, due to the massive amount of data to be analyzed and processed in such digital systems, they are often slow and incapable of operating at standard video rates. One technique often utilized to alleviate this problem is the use of parallel processing. However, a number of constraints limit the use of this approach including, with the advent of VLSI techniques, the chip pin-out contraints.